If you’re going to launch a film about the world’s most vexing political problem, there is no venue more suitably spectacular than the United Nations building in New York.

That was the location for last Monday’s US premiere of Miral, a new movie about an Arab girl growing up in east Jerusalem during twenty years of tragic Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

As befits a film about occupation, the UN set up security checkpoints to screen me and the other 1,400 invited guests. We were a strange mix of journalists, celebrities, socialites, diplomats, and liberal activists. I was badly delayed by a well-funded woman who had to pass through the metal detector three times before she had fully removed her jewelry.

The UN building was wearing its own war-zone wardrobe, as its half-gutted frame undergoes major renovations.